Is it worth paying nearly £100 more for this mobo?

[360bhp]

Making a new build (600w, i5, ssd, gtx460) mainly for gaming and editing HD video. Trying to keep costs low as possible.

As for the motherboard.. Should I go with this one?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...oard-micro-atx

or pay a bit more for this?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...a-on-board-mic


I will be using an OCz SSD... Will the Sata II and Sata III make a difference on the motherboards?

Any alternative suggestions would be appreciated too!

[PowerPie5000]

SATA-III does make a difference with the latest SSD's. Also, if you plan on doing any heavy overclocking then the more expensive board is the one to get (more power phases with heatsinks that are located around the CPU socket). The Z68 chipset is a good choice for a high end Sandy Bridge setup.

Are you only interested in getting a micro ATX board or could you also get a full sized ATX one? There are other boards that are cheaper than the Asus Maximus Gene that will be just as good (both micro and full size). Will you consider other brands such as Gigabyte or MSI?... Try not to get pulled in by fancy gimmicks or features that you'll never use (you can save a bit of cash this way ).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That cheap motherboard looks rubbish. It only has two RAM slots and also if you intend to overclock the CPU you need to use a P67 or Z68 based motherboard. The H61 also lacks ACHI which is useful for SSDs. Newer SSDs also can take advantage of SATA3.0 too.

If you want to get a cheaper motherboard I would suggest this H67 based one:

http://www.ebuyer.com/259261-biostar...dio-matx-th67b

[scaryjim]

If you want to buy a k-series CPU and overclock it, then an H61/H67 motherboard won't do the job: you'll need a P67 / Z68. I'm not sure there's a huge amount of point going for a Z68 above a P67 though: the only difference is that the Z68 can use the onboard graphics and quicksync - although I believe if you have a discreet card then you need to do a bit of a hack to get quicksync working anyway: and then it's only helpful if you're encoding video using a program that's been written to make use of quicksync. So unless you know for a fact that you want quicksync, I'd go with a cheaper P67 board.

I definitely don't see the point of going with a H61 board unless you're very short on budget (although you're planning on using an SSD so I guess that's not the case) or you want to use integrated graphics (but you're planning on buying a gfx card, so again that doesn't seem likely). If you decide you do want quicksync then you're probably better off paying the extra for a Z68, tbh.

As to whether SATAII will make a difference: it will make a measurable difference, but whether that difference will be noticable is another matter entirely. The biggest advantage of SSDs is their very fast random access, rather than the somewhat e-peenish sequential numbers that are usually quoted, and (looking back at a few hexus reviews) moving from SATAII to SATAIII makes negligible difference there.

[360bhp]

Thanks gentlemen. Is biostar any good? Would prefer Asus or Gigabyte

Are you only interested in getting a micro ATX board or could you also get a full sized ATX one?

I would prefer full size ATX to be honest

Don't need onboard grfx.

This one seem ok? http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

[scaryjim]

Looks as good as any...

[PowerPie5000]

This one seem ok? http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

Seems pretty good for the price... Go for it

[360bhp]

Thanks for all your help so far.

What do you think of this build?




Also, I will have a spare Corsair 450vx from my current build. Can I use it with this new build? I also have 2 4-pin power to pci-e for the graphics card, which I'm assuming will take 2 power connections. I would like to overclock the i3 a little too, so have to bear that in mind. If I can keep PSU I have, it will save me £60

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

BTW,Bulldozer is being released next month so unless you really need to upgrade now I would see how it performs. TBH,a Core i3 2100 is not that great for video encoding:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...ded-power.html

My mildy overclocked Q6600 is faster than my Core i3 2100.

The Core i3 2100 has a locked multiplier. The base clock can only be raised by a few percent and even then it could lead to issues.

The Agility 3 also use asynchronous NAND which means it is not that great for uncompressible data like video,images and music.

This Adata drive use a SandForce SF2281 controller and synchronous NAND but with uncompressable data losses in most tests to the Crucal C300:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=31108&page=4

This is down to fact it uses very few NAND chips. However,there have been no reviews of the 60GB version of the Agility 3. If it uses less NAND chips than its larger cousins it is also likely to suffer from the same issue IMHO as the Adata drive. There seems to be a distinct lack of reviews of the 60GB versions of the OCZ Solid 3,Agility 3,Vertex 3 and Corsair Force 3 and Force 3 GT SSDs.

The Crucial M4 64GB is around 25% faster in writes and around 15% to 20% faster in reads than the Crucial C300 64GB.